Page 56 of A Smart Girl's Guide to Second Chances
Chapter 26
‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ I said.
I stared at him. He’d said it in a totally matter of fact way, as if he’d casually brought up work. Since Alex had arrived, I’d been berating myself for doubting his motives, for even thinking that he might be here for me. The prick of vindication transformed into something more potent.
‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘You don’t mess up the lives of people you want to be with!’
He blinked a few times, and I didn’t wait for him to speak.
‘Do you know how much you messed things up for me back then?’ I asked. Anger, lying dormant somewhere deep for almost a decade, rose up like lava. ‘After I quit my job, they gave away my spot, and there was a big black mark against my name. The job market was a mess back then. Australia had barely avoided the recession. I’d missed all the application deadlines and I couldn’t get a grad job anywhere. Miranda, the partner who’d interviewed me, took pity and managed to get me an assistant role. I spent a year arranging meeting rooms and booking travel, watching the grads who should have been my peers begin their careers, while I had to prove myself.’
‘Wait—’
‘But actually, it wasn’t about the job,’ I said, everything unspoken bursting out of me. ‘I mean it was, that wasn’t great.But you were the only person in the world who knew what Mum leaving did to me. I told you that I didn’t want to be with you, to fall in love with you, because I couldn’t handle getting hurt. And you promised that we’d be different. You promised me that you wouldn’t hurt me. And then you asked me to trust you, to rearrange my life for you. And I did – I jumped.
‘Then you choseyourresearch,yourwork, over me. I was the person who wasn’t chosen. I was the person who wasn’t enough. I was the person who was left. You broke me open. Again.’
I stopped talking to catch my breath, drained after resecting almost a decade’s worth of metastasised hurt.
‘I didn’t leave you. You left me,’ he said. ‘But... I think we might remember the end of that night differently.’ His husky voice had softened and the expression on his face was gentler than it had been over the last week. He looked more like the Oxford Alex I’d known.
My heart began to pound.
‘What’s the last conversation you remember from that night?’ he asked.
‘The Ferris wheel. You told me you weren’t coming with me to London,’ I said. I could hear the tinge of uncertainty that had crept into my voice. ‘That was the last time we saw each other. Right?’
He shook his head. We both stood in silence facing each other for a moment.
‘Do you think... I had another blackout that night?’ I asked in a quiet voice.
‘A lot more happened. After the Ferris wheel,’ he said, his voice still gentle. The fire of my anger and his acerbic tone were gone. It was just the two of us trying to work something out together. On the same team again. ‘So, if that’s your final memory of us then, yeah, I think you probably did.’
I’d woken up the morning after the ball and known I’d lost time after I’d taken a pill on a stomach filled with the ball’s free-flowing champagne and the gin I’d drunk with Lily. I’d felt so much shame – I thought I’d cured myself of panic attacks, that I no longer had to rely on pharmaceutical help to manage my emotions. But, even more, I hated the idea that I might have temporarily lost control of my mind. That was the kind of thing that happened in dark psychological thrillers with moody covers or as a plot twist in a silly soapy melodrama.
And honestly, it wasn’t a night I’d wanted to dwell on. I’d had no interest in worrying about memories I didn’t want to cling to, anyway. Who wanted to remember the pain of the night their boyfriend left them? I figured that if anything important had happened, that if I’d seen Alex again, surely it would have penetrated my consciousness. And so I’d let go of thinking about that hole in my memory.
‘You told me once, just after we met, that it had happened before. And after what you said the other day, in your bedroom... I wondered,’ he said. I wasn’t surprised that he was able to recall a conversation from almost a decade earlier. ‘I came today because I knew you’d be here. And I wanted to test my theory. I needed to know if everything I’ve thought about how we ended was wrong.’
How had we ended? What had Alex thought for all these years?
‘Do you want to know what happened that night?’ he asked as if he could read my mind, his voice low and calm.
‘Yes.’
He took a slow, deep breath. ‘I was waiting for you at the bottom of your staircase. You finally came down and we went for a long walk, away from the crowds...’
Alex trailed off and I could tell that he was wondering if he should go on, that his mind was doing a quick evaluation of both the cost and benefit of continuing this story.
‘I want to know,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I told you that I’d done some research and that it was pretty easy to get an American working visa if you were married to someone with a student visa. And that I loved you and knew that I wanted to be with you forever. And I thought you felt the same way about me.’ He paused and looked away for a moment. ‘So then I got down on one knee and said, “Rebecca, will you marry me?”’
I felt my jaw involuntarily drop and my eyes widen with shock. Was I having a hallucination?
‘You got down on one knee and proposed. And I said yes?’ I asked. His expression morphed as he registered the shock in my voice. He looked like I’d physically hurt him.
‘You did.’
